[269/365] hours

[cosmolinguist]

A lecturer just told us that a credit at my university is 10 hours of work. All my classes are 20 credits (I have three per semester).

So they're each meant to be 200 hours of work, minus lecture and seminar time leaves 167 hours of independent work. An average of 13-14 hours per week (it’d be two hours a day not counting reading week).

But sheesh with three classes that’s six hours a day?! Besides lectures and seminars, and work, and everything else. Maybe I would like to sleep ever, or watch a movie, or eat?

Comments

[purplecat]

As I've always had this explained to me, the 200 hours is supposed to include exams and revision so notionally over a 15 week semester 60 credits works out as 40 hours a week - obvious if all your exams cluster at the start of week 14 then that doesn't work so well.

TBH though, whenever I've been involved in module design its been a matter of designing coursework and labs/tutorials as seemed appropriate, checking there was a good 20-40 hours at least left over for revision and not worrying too much if there was more independent study time than that - certainly not figuring out what a student would be independently studying in that time.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah in telling us about the structure of the course he even told us that, like, our reports are due after Christmas so we can work on them over the break. Averaging it out as the same number of hours for every week doesn't make a lot of sense...we're nearly at the end of the first week now and this was said during the first hour I'd devoted to the course so I'm not going to get 13 or 14 hours in this week, that's for sure. :)

[purplecat]

You're right - if you discount the first couple of weeks on the basis that there's nothing to do then it doesn't work. I guess the fall back is that in most cases the 10 hours per credit really is a convenient fiction (though one that needs to be maintained in order to justify the idea that we occupy you guys full time and hence a whole load of knock on stuff relating to funding, visas, benefits and the like) but if the lecturer really is giving you material that genuinely requires 10 hours per credit of study then... well, I guess, then I don't think he's being particularly realistic or reasonable (but sadly neither of those things ever stopped an academic doing something they'd decided was the right thing to do).

[brithistorian]

Interesting. American courses seem to take less time that that. The guideline I was told when I started college was to expect to spend 2 hours of work out of class for every hour spent in class. Since a typical class meets 3 hours per week, that comes out to 9 hours per week per class. The minimum course load to be considered full-time is 4 classes (technically 12 credits - I did have some classes that weren't 3-credit classes, but the 3-credit class is the standard), so that works out to an work-week, in and out of class, of 36 hours.

On the other hand, I spend most of my university career going to school half-time and working full-time simultaneously, so once I graduated and was "only" working full time, I felt like I had all kinds of extra free time.

ETA: The numbers I gave above are for undergraduate courses. In graduate school you're apparently expected to be doing more work out of class, because in grad school 6 credits is considered full-time.

[barakta]

My understanding from talking to another North American who has studied in both UK and USA is that the UK is much less flexible about taking courses as and when and doing a degree at different rates. Usually in the UK you have to sign up for 'full time' and it's a set course with X modules per year with Y optional modules (where Y can be zero).

We don't have a concept of taking classes, skipping say a semester or taking a lower course load and then picking up more in future. We also can't easily transfer credit between different universities although informally it can sometimes happen.

[cosmolinguist]

Some courses in the U.S. are as rigid as the UK system, like law or pre-med or something, but generally yes you're not on A Course like I am here and only taking subjects (more or less) in that subject.

Another thing that has immeasurable effect is that an undergrad degree is expected to take four years in the USA, and is only three years in the UK! No wonder I'm so tired. :)

[brithistorian]

It's interesting how different the two systems are - it seems like given the close ties between the two countries, their university systems would be more similar.

[worlds_of_smoke]

maaaan, I know that feeling. x.x This semester is killing me!

[cosmolinguist]

Here's hoping it's good for both of us.

[norfolkian]

The thing about this though, is people work at different paces, and I suspect you may also find that some classes require more work than others. Personally, I'd take that with a pinch of salt.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh I've used up a whole bag of salt on just the things he's said so far. I wasn't taking this to heart at all, just sharing it as one of the many unhelpful things he said.

[norfolkian]

Yes, I agree it's unhelpful. It can make you feel like you're not doing enough! He sounds very annoying.

[cosmolinguist]

He's so annoying. He seems bizarrely reluctant to give us any information until it's absolutely necessary -- he's deliberately withholding the reading list from us, only offering it one week at a time (when I checked a few days ago, the first week's wasn't even available which is annoying when I need to track down accessible versions of everything!) and there's no syllabus. In trying to explain a convulted system of what's expected of us in the course, he had to say things like "Week 3 is a lecture in Topic 2 and a seminar on Topic 1...I don't like to say what they are" and he made some kind of joke about liking to keep people in suspense. I am not amused.

[lorigami]

that is an alarming amount of work!